Yes, Time Really Slows Down When You’re Running Hard

One of the things I love about running, and particularly hard running, is the peculiar sort of reality distortion field that takes over your mind. When you’re pushing your limits, you’re in a mental state that’s far removed from day-to-day life and can’t be accessed at any other time or in any other way.

One of the hallmarks of that state, to the point of cliché, is that time slows down. How eternally long, in mental time, is the last lap of a mile or the last mile of a marathon?

At least, that’s how it seems. But is this all simply an illusion?

Let me clarify. Of course it’s an illusion, from the perspective of chronological time. Unless you’re running close to the speed of light, time is flowing in the usual way no matter how deep you dig. But what about perceived time? Is your ability to estimate how long it takes, say, five seconds to pass distorted?

That’s the question a new study in Physiology & Behavior, from researchers at the University of St. Mark and St. John in Plymouth, UK (an institution also known, with quintessentially British inscrutability, as Plymouth Marjon University), tackles.

The study design is delightfully straightforward. A group of 12 volunteers did two different exercise tasks: a 30-second stationary bike ride, and 20 minutes on a rowing machine. They repeated each of these tasks three times, on three different days, at three different effort levels corresponding to light (11 on a scale of 6 to 20), heavy (15), and maximal (20) exertion.

There were no clocks showing during their efforts. Instead, they were told to indicate when they thought 25 percent, 50 percent, 75 percent, and 100 percent of the assigned time period had expired.

Here’s the relationship between chronological and perceived time for the 20-minute rowing exercise:

Physiology & Behavior

The dashed line indicates the passage of 1,200 seconds (20 minutes) of actual chronological time. The other lines show how perception varied as a function of how hard they were pushing. In the hardest effort, they thought they were done after about 1,025 seconds on average (a bit longer than 17 minutes), a time warp of about 15 percent, most of which happened in the last (and most painful) half of the effort. The 30-second bike test, on a much shorter timescale, produced similar results.

So what’s going on here? As the authors point out, there’s previous research showing that time slows down where you’re in danger: “as danger increases, the subjective perception of time elapsed decreases (shrinks) due to greater than usual sensory awareness in a given period of time.” Nobody really knows how we keep track of time or where in the brain we store our neural representation of time, so it’s hard to determine what’s actually happening when time seems to slow down.

Interestingly, there are some other effort-related illusions that have been demonstrated in labs. Your estimates of distance will be higher if you’re wearing a heavy backpack; your guess about the steepness of a hill will be greater if you’re tired.

The authors suggest there are some implications here for distributing your effort in races: “This may have practical implications for the accurate pacing of races, whereby athletes could benefit from external reinforcements and feedback of chronological time elapsed in order to accurately judge the duration of the event, evaluate remaining physical resources and gain an optimal outcome.”

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I’d add a caveat here that optimizing your effort doesn’t necessarily require an accurate knowledge of elapsed time, especially you’re running on feel. But I don’t disagree that it’s often useful to hear or see splits periodically to check how you’re doing.

The other implication, of course, is that you’re not crazy and it’s not just you. And I think it’s worth repeating the explanation the researchers gave for time dilation in dangerous conditions: “greater than usual sensory awareness.” Running hard is a very intense, heightened state of awareness. Time crawls, and it hurts. But there can be no doubt whatsoever, during those moments, that you’re alive.

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